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Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

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Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#61
post #21

My concern here is that by gravitating to HTML you lose the ability for a human (you!) to easily co-author the document with the LLM. If it’s just an explainer for your consumption, that’s not a concern - but if it’s a spec sheet for something more complex, I deeply value being able to dive in and edit what is produced for me. With a HTML doc it is much harder to do that than with MD. Now of course you could just rep…

Yes that’s the case. And as Anthropic staff, author has an incentive to promote workflows that require an agent to interact with text documents.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#62
post #61
post #21

My concern here is that by gravitating to HTML you lose the ability for a human (you!) to easily co-author the document with the LLM. If it’s just an explainer for your consumption, that’s not a concern - but if it’s a spec sheet for something more complex, I deeply value being able to dive in and edit what is produced for me. With a HTML doc it is much harder to do that than with MD. Now of course you could just rep…

Yes that’s the case. And as Anthropic staff, author has an incentive to promote workflows that require an agent to interact with text documents.

I've yet to see Anthropic promote any sort of token optimization strategy to its users - they always assume we all have infinite inference.

"No bread? Let them eat cake!"

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#63
post #34
post #21

My concern here is that by gravitating to HTML you lose the ability for a human (you!) to easily co-author the document with the LLM. If it’s just an explainer for your consumption, that’s not a concern - but if it’s a spec sheet for something more complex, I deeply value being able to dive in and edit what is produced for me. With a HTML doc it is much harder to do that than with MD. Now of course you could just rep…

We have been authoring HTML by hand for decades with ease. Text editors are very good at it, and many have commands to auto-wrap, auto-close etc. Reading and writing is simple.

You have been authoring HTML by hand for decades. Not every SWE is a FE dev.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#64
post #62
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes that’s the case. And as Anthropic staff, author has an incentive to promote workflows that require an agent to interact with text documents.

I've yet to see Anthropic promote any sort of token optimization strategy to its users - they always assume we all have infinite inference. "No bread? Let them eat cake!"

Nah they do. They push Sonnet pretty hard rather than Opus for most tasks.

Also: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agents-and-tools/tool-us...

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#65
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have been authoring HTML by hand for decades with ease. Text editors are very good at it, and many have commands to auto-wrap, auto-close etc. Reading and writing is simple.

You have been authoring HTML by hand for decades. Not every SWE is a FE dev.

Java engineers write lots of HTML in java docs:)

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#66
post #62
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes that’s the case. And as Anthropic staff, author has an incentive to promote workflows that require an agent to interact with text documents.

I've yet to see Anthropic promote any sort of token optimization strategy to its users - they always assume we all have infinite inference. "No bread? Let them eat cake!"

I've noticed that's changed over the past month or so. Claude-code used to happily pipe build commands straight into context, but recently it's been running them as background tasks that pipe to file, and it'll search and do partial reads on the output instead.

It also gives tips on reducing context size when you run /context .

Presumably they are actually starting to feel the pinch on inference costs themselves with what still feels like a fairly generous max plan.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#68
post #66
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've yet to see Anthropic promote any sort of token optimization strategy to its users - they always assume we all have infinite inference. "No bread? Let them eat cake!"

I've noticed that's changed over the past month or so. Claude-code used to happily pipe build commands straight into context, but recently it's been running them as background tasks that pipe to file, and it'll search and do partial reads on the output instead. It also gives tips on reducing context size when you run /context . Presumably they are actually starting to feel the pinch on inference costs themselves with…

And it seems to use head, tail etc. more than it used to, even when unnecessary, which, combined with the recent(?) tendency of more chaining and as you said, piping to temp files and the like, totally screwed up claude code’s auto approval system for me (by auto approval I mean the system to decide which commands can be run without permission prompt, based on the permissions.allow setting among other things, not to be confused with a specific new approval mode called “auto” that burns more tokens to decide whether the command is safe). I had to write my own auto approval system and plug it in as a hook.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#69
post #3

Web technologies got so many things right. People complain about it so much but it's amazing. I worked with a vibe coded app at my last job (and since quit due to it) and because it was a nextjs SPA frontend with a separate API backend, the user facing urls didn't match the backend endpoints. Because AI uses react hooks for everything, state is in-memory, url-based routing isn't a thing unless you design for it. So l…

Wait so when u navigate to a different page/tab the url wouldn’t update?

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#70
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have been authoring HTML by hand for decades with ease. Text editors are very good at it, and many have commands to auto-wrap, auto-close etc. Reading and writing is simple.

You have been authoring HTML by hand for decades. Not every SWE is a FE dev.

Most front end devs can’t get HTML right either.
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